Prelude
by withyouandthemoon
Summary: And then she stepped out into the world that he once promised her. A Caroline-centered one-shot. Takes on after the end of TVD, but before my head-canon in which Caroline goes to NOLA.


**I wrote this some time ago and posted it on Tumblr. Hope you enjoy it despite its flaws. This was my first try at writing a fic in English after all, lol.**

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Damon was the first to go.

Caroline did not expect that. She always thought it would be Elena, or Bonnie-not that she wished for either of them to go, but from the very start Elena had been the most human of them all, and Bonnie…Bonnie had had her fair share of near-death experiences as it was. Even herself-as the last vampire standing in Mystic Falls, she wasn't naïve enough to humor the notion that she could just live happily forever.

But never had she thought that it would be Damon. Maybe a tiniest part of her would always picture Damon as the mysterious young man turning up out of the blue, with abysmal eyes and abysmal powers. Even if they faced multitudes of more powerful, more indestructible enemies post-Damon, even if Damon became a mere human post-cure, Caroline had subconsciously felt that Damon would live long into the unforeseeable future.

God knows he had been in the Civil Wars. That was _old_.

Or maybe that was just Damon. He came with a dramatic entrance, sauntering into this one-horse town when everyone knew literally nothing of the supernatural world, wreaking havoc while he was at it. And when he left he ought to go with a flourish, reuniting every friend and family member all over the world to see him off-though there couldn't be a more anti-climactic ending than dying of old age.

He didn't even live long enough for Elena's 50th birthday.

The cure was as fair to every former undead as it was cruel. Katherine, with 500 hundred years of calamity and glory, turned grey in just a few months. And Damon's hundred or so years took their toll on him in the end.

"Actually I think I lucked out." Lying in bed in Liz's former bedroom (the old Salvatore house had long become the boarding school, and he steadfastly refused to spend his last days in a hospital), Damon wiggled his brows towards Caroline. The orange light of the sunset cast through the windows onto his face, his blue eyes almost transparent in the soft hue. "Oh I hate this color." He held the corner of the white sheet between his fingers, which was a shade of gold in the sunlight, grimacing before loosening his hold on it.

"You always hated yellow. I know." Caroline tried hard not to roll her eyes, the corner of her lips turning up instead.

Damon looked up at her somewhat thoughtfully. After a while he offered an off-handed response, "No, not always."

In the last 20 years they still hadn't become best of friends. Damon had Alaric for a drinking buddy, blowing off steam and just fooling around. For a rare heart-to-heart he had Bonnie. Not to mention Elena-they were practically joined at the hips. Call it differences in disposition, or call it old grudges, but Damon Salvatore and Caroline Forbes were just not meant to be BFFs. Even so, the bond between them had gradually and imperceptibly grown inseverable.

Because of Liz Forbes.

Because of Stephan Salvatore.

Caroline didn't know if this was the first lesson on being an immortal. The bond holding you together with someone was defined not by yourselves or your dynamic, but by the time you co-existed, the memories you shared-the deaths you withstood in each other's company.

"You will see him."

Damon glanced at her while fiddling with the day-light ring on his finger (he never took it off), taunt in his eyes, though not as sharp as the old days.

Caroline reiterated with punctuation, "You _will_ see him. And _when_ you do, tell him that we're all doing well here-we miss him, but we're doing well." She laughed a little, "Of course, he probably already knows all that. Oh, and tell him that we'll meet him one day and just be patient, especially now that you're going to be bothering him day and night."

Damon rolled his eyes, "Ever the optimistic, huh, Blondie? You know, I've been wondering for the past twenty years. Did my blood have a genetic mutation in your body? 'Cause my bloodline couldn't possibly be this sunshine-rainbow-unicornly. It clashes with my image."

Caroline just lifted her eyebrows for the sake of it.

"Seriously, how can you be so sure?" After a few minutes' silence, Caroline almost thought he had fallen asleep, but Damon revisited the topic, "how do you know that in a year, or ten years, or even a century, that you can see someone again?"

Caroline looked out the window. The windows in Liz's bedroom faced the courtyard of her childhood home. From this angle, she could vaguely see the white roof of the porch spreading into the sky, as if calling for something, or maybe reminding, "Sometimes you just need something to hold on to. And sometimes…You just know."

That was their last conversation. That night, Damon died peacefully in Elena's arms.

Everyone came to the funeral. Including Bonnie, who was traveling the world; Matt and Jeremy, who were assisting a case of "animal attack" in a police station on the west coast; Lizzie and Josie, who had settled down in Atlanta. Their whole Mystic Gang.

Caroline stood in a far corner, with dark sunglasses that were so not her style, watching people congregating and then scattering, every word of whisper meant or not meant to be heard reaching her ears in perfect clarity- but Mystic Falls could not know of her existence. Not anymore.

A few years after that, it was Alaric's turn.

And then Matt. Bonnie. Jeremy.

Caroline developed a new tradition. For every person who left, she would add another frame on the wall beside her bed. All these years she preserved the most completed and up-to-date photo collection of their gang. She would spend several unsleeping nights perusing every accurately-named file and neatly-labelled album, selecting the perfect smile to be staying still in said frame.

And the other unsleeping nights after that, she would stand by her bed, cleaning the frames in moonlight, or just counting them, forward and backward.

It wasn't as creepy as it sounded-Caroline reasoned with herself. After all, she had seen someone carrying a bunch of caskets for a thousand years. You couldn't get much creepier than _that_.

And then it was Elena. Elena, who everybody loved, who really glued their little gang together for all these years, who Caroline adored and envied and hated and couldn't fathom being without, who she hadn't separated with since childhood.

In her last hours, Elena lay in the exact same bed where Damon had passed away, her eyes and smile as gentle and compassionate as when she was 17, "Oh, Care, I'm so sorry."

"There's nothing to apologize for, Elena." Caroline held her shriveled hand, "They are waiting for you."

"Someone's been waiting for _you_ , you know."

Caroline didn't act like she couldn't understand. She was well past the phase of pretending and denial. But she also didn't feel like answering. The correspondences interspersed all these passing years, every word of which crossing her mind, only to be overshadowed by Elena's increasingly labored breaths and heart beats. So she just held her hand, hand that was still warm with a bit more force, and reciprocated the smile that she knew so well.

Elena's funeral was greatly different from Damon's. Almost everyone present had been her former co-workers or patients, instead of friends and family. They didn't have kids-someone with both possible doppelganger blood and the cure in his veins would have been destined for a life with too many unpredictable dangers.

Caroline stood afar as always, listening in on people wishing Elena reunite in heaven with the love of her life.

" _That kind of love never dies._ " She remembered someone once saying something like that.

A week passed and Caroline still couldn't remember when or where she heard that line. The strengthened powers of a vampire did not include superior memory. Caroline smiled wryly before putting the photo of Elena she had chosen into the newly-added frame.

Another ten years and it came to Lizzie and Josie.

They were, after all, Alaric's girls. Their magical powers were guided to thrive in the boarding school, but eventually both of them had settled for a normal human life. They hadn't sought out the spell for longevity like so many other witches did.

These two funerals Caroline did not attend.

After Lizzie and Josie each had kids, she slowly bowed out of their lives-she still talked to her little girls as often as she could, but her grandchildren mostly knew nothing about her. A normal human life far away from the supernatural world had not a place for a grandma who didn't age. It was Lizzie and Josie's choice.

She snuck into Lizzie's hospital room late at night, during non-visiting hours. In a certain difficult breath Lizzie woke up from her fitful sleep and saw her, before smiling into the oxygen mask. Alaric once said that her smile could light up the whole room-just like Caroline's.

"Mom," Lizzie blinked, "It's so nice to see you."

"I'm here." Caroline bent down to kiss her on the forehead, just like what she did when she kissed them good night in their childhood, "Mommy's here."

That was also the last words she said to Josie.

She didn't go to their funerals.

In the following months, something Bill Forbes had said before he died constantly sounded in her mind, "Parents are not supposed to outlive their children."

Sometimes she didn't know if it was a blessing or a curse.

When Caroline was young, she experienced too many deaths in too short a time span. Mystic Falls was like the swirl in the supernatural tides, dragging them all down. But somehow they escaped, even sailed their little ships into the distance. However, no one escapes time.

When death poured down like storms, you didn't have a chance to stop, to mourn, to feel. You could only run and run and run some more, wishing that you might one day come out the other side in one piece. But when death snuck into you layer by layer like the chill of night, you could barely get up before you were stiff and frozen, unable to move a limb.

The funny thing was, vampires were not susceptible to coldness.

Maybe for that exact reason, Caroline overlooked the signs. She didn't care that she had more and more sleepless nights, spending more and more time counting the frames. She didn't notice that when she was with the kids at the boarding school she couldn't find the sparkling happiness that used to warm up her heart. She didn't realize that her world was fading and muting right before her, in spite of her vampire eyesight and hearing that only augmented as her years grew.

Caroline only felt more and more stressed. And when under stress, Caroline Forbes always turned to stress-cleaning.

Halfway through her closet, she found her old phone inside the pocket of a coat that she hadn't worn for years.

Before she realized what she was doing, the phone was playing against her ear the only voice mail that she kept.

She heard that low, accented voice a whole century away, talking to her about food, music, art and culture. She could hear the smile in his voice, the music flowing in the street where he stood, and the sunshine sizzling in his dark blonde hair.

And just like that, her world was reignited.

She felt slightly dizzy from the barrage of colors and sounds storming into her head, but her trembling fingers pressed the buttons without a miss, the number that she knew by heart to this day.

It went to voice mail.

Caroline opened her mouth, but no sound came out. They had kept in touch through the years, in tacit mutual understanding choosing the old-fashioned way of correspondence, which was few and far between. For a century she hadn't once heard his voice, nor he hers.

But Caroline had forgot how her body would act on its own accord whenever she was facing him. She felt a strange yet familiar sound coming from deep inside her chest,

"Klaus."

Just this one word.

Yet she felt drained.

But the whole world that she regained, or rather rediscovered moments ago was sending a steady flow of strength into her, invigorating her perpetually.

The screen of her phone quietly lit up on the morning of the following day. Caroline opened the text, her heart uncannily calm and peaceful.

 _It wouldn't hurt to prove me right once in a century, love._

She smiled, picking up the bag that she had already packed the night before.

And then she stepped out into the world that he once promised her.


End file.
